Operation of individual process units in a manufacturing process, such as at an industrial plant, is generally supervised by process operators. The process operators are responsible for meeting production targets, such as determined by the planning department, and complying with existing safety, environmental and other constraints. Operators are generally organized into shifts that regularly rotate in time, such as three (3) eight (8) hour shifts per day. Deviations from expected target parameter behavior often indicative of process problems are generally automatically detected and recorded during each shift. These deviations include deviations from production targets that violate certain imposed upper or lower limits, or a focus value. When the shift changes, recording of deviation is generally closed and a responsible individual, usually an operator, and in some cases shift supervisors, technicians or process engineers, are requested to provide annotations (including reason(s)) why the specific deviations occurred during their shift.
Typically, operators can enter one or more reasons for each deviation, and indicate the severity (or priority) of the deviation as being high/medium/low. This information can be used by process engineers, head operators and other production staff for periodic reviews to identify significant process problems and analyze why they occurred to determine actions to prevent or minimize future deviations.
However, responsible individuals are known to minimize efforts regarding entry of reasons for deviations, which can result in missing annotations. Another problem is consistency of annotations. Specifically, the same problem can be explained differently by the same responsible individual at a different time, and explained differently by different responsible individuals even at the same time, such as due responsible individuals from various teams who have different experience/understanding of the process. What is needed is a new methodology and associated system for making entry of annotations for process deviations more consistent.